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Every AMD APU since introduction of HSA did it, which is how AMD ended up doing SoCs for PS4, PS5, and Xbox
by p_l 4mo ago
Every AMD APU since introduction of HSA did it, which is how AMD ended up doing SoCs for PS4, PS5, and Xbox
- throwaway27448 4mo agoOk, so which one of these contemporary or previous chipsets could compete with the M1 for inference? Perhaps I'm missing some major detail.
- ac29 4mo agoThe M1 isnt particularly good at inference, so pretty much every major current competitor with a 256+ bit unified memory system is better: AMD Strix Halo, NVIDIA DGX Spark, possibly Intel Panther Lake
- throwaway27448 4mo agoSure, but none of these shipped before the M1. That was the first chip I encountered that managed to do something useful without a discrete GPU.
- Rohansi 4mo agoYou were likely only using Intel systems then. AMD systems have had iGPUs capable of light gaming for a very long time. It took Intel a long time to get to that level, after M1 (2020).
- p_l 4mo agoEven in Apple land M1 isn't the first with unified memory - pretty much all intel on-chip GPU (Sandy Bridge and newer) count - it was even a reason for driver issues early in intel's new dedicated GPU lineup, as the drivers expected unified memory - but M1 is essentially modification of an iPad chip, and you can see "unified memory" there going all the way back to first chip Apple bought from Samsung to power iPhone 2G
- Rohansi 4mo agoYou are missing a major detail: integrated GPUs are crap. They win on efficiency but not on raw compute. Before AI (and crypto too, I guess) people bought GPUs to render graphics and that was their main consumer. People built more and more demanding games that required increasingly powerful GPUs to render well. Gaming systems always had a discrete GPU so there was no reason to scale up integrated GPUs because they wouldn't sell, or they would be a waste of die space. I don't think the M1 specifically focused on inference. Their goal was to replace Intel/AMD/Nvidia with their own chips, and since the previous Macs shipped discrete GPUs, they had to match or beat those so they don't ship something slower.